Author
Topic: Episode 24 Posted (Read 11826 times)

Awsome Podcast! These interviews are very cool, liked them alot. I've noticed Steve has a bit of comedian in him sometimes. Also I get the feeling next week on Spore talk he'll say "sorry no new info, but I do have a tidbit and will show it on next weeks show." The utter torture!

Great PSP rant. I mean, REALLY great because the future of the PSP really has to be addressed so i hope you come back to the topic soon and dedicate more time into elaborating where things seem to be going wrong.

Also, i just got an ipod video. I didnt buy a psp primarily for video but vid capabilities helped me justify the cost. But in the end the process of moving files back and forth was a pain and the lack of sony support for this feature was rediculous. But with my ipod video then things are so easy. All the files i converted for psp (but never actually watched) work perfect on the ipod and the itunes store is very promising for those who dont want to go through the process of converting. $30 for a proprietary UMD movie vs $7-9 for an itunes movie that can be viewed on a tv? Things are going to get interesting and hopefully the end result is Sony starts focusing more on games than movie partnerships.

I agree with you totally. The PSP should be like a swiss army knife not a dull blade! It is fine that it plays games and does other stuff buty it should not loose its focus. Is the PSP Just for games, or Just pictures, or music or video? or is it all of the above?I was having a conversation with a friend whos entire house is a shrine to Sony Products thast wants to buy a PSP.My friend wants one not for the games, not for the movies, pictures or music. The only reason is the _sony_ name. for him the focus of the PSP is not so much as a Portable game system. For my friendd it is more like a $250 thing with the sony logo on it.

Things that try to be too many things are bad. Thats why the car that turns into a boat never caught on.

Podcast good, however 1 point to bring up. If theres a low turn out for the name that game its always assumed that its due to the game being too hard to guess and the subsequent competition is really easy. I think its more to do with some prizes being more desireable than others. I've known the answers to a few of the ones tagged as hard but I didnt enter because I didnt like the sound of the prize: I wouldnt want an Xbox hat on principle.

good blogcast, Steve. My brother (also named Steve )got into the whole Swordquest and AtariAge marketing program when Earthworld came out. I was busy moving from NC to Colorado at the time, so I gave him my 2600. (I ended up buying a couple of 2600s on Ebay a few years ago to make up for this stupendous blunder)

In connection to my EULA post I found a blog where the author backs up what I wrote with proof...

I recently performed a rather long reversing session on a piece of software written by Blizzard Entertainment, yes - the ones who made Warcraft, and World of Warcraft (which has 4.5 million+ players now, apparently). This software is known as the 'warden client' - its written like shellcode in that it's position independant. It is downloaded on the fly from Blizzard's servers, and it runs about every 15 seconds. It is one of the most interesting pieces of spyware to date, because it is designed only to verify compliance with a EULA/TOS. Here is what it does, about every 15 seconds, to about 4.5 million people (500,000 of which are logged on at any given time):

The warden dumps all the DLL's using a ToolHelp API call. It reads information from every DLL loaded in the 'world of warcraft' executable process space. No big deal.

The warden then uses the GetWindowTextA function to read the window text in the titlebar of every window. These are windows that are not in the WoW process, but any program running on your computer. Now a Big Deal.

.....

This behavior places the warden client squarely in the category of spyware. What is interesting about this is that it might be the first use of spyware to verify compliance with a EULA. I cannot imagine that such practices will be legal in the future, but right now in terms of law, this is the wild wild west. You can't blame Blizz for trying, as well as any other company, but this practice will have to stop if we have any hope of privacy. Agree w/ botting or game cheaters or not, this is a much larger issue called 'privacy' and Blizz has no right to be opening my excel or PGP programs, for whatever reason.

Wow, ToshiP, nice find. I had heard about the WoW spyware rumor. Serious privacy violation here if its reporting on every open window title, regardless of what the EULA might say. Has Blizzard had any comments on this yet?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represented developers in court for BnetD (a free open-source Battle.net) that Blizzard brought a lawsuit against. So I find it kind of poetic that EFF is now on the offensive against Blizzard. Probably the EFF is pretty livid and bitter with Blizzard for what they tried to do to the BnetD folks. So I foresee these things happening...

1.) In about a week or two this story will be in every major online news site. 2.) Blizzard will deny or not respond. 3.) Blogs and Podcasters will start yapping this up like they did "Hot Coffee". 4.) WOW players will get word of this on their favorite WOW fan sites and the WOW forums and will have a kanipshin fit and scream bloody marry. 5.) Competitors will seize the opportunity to boost their game has NO SPYWARE (which they do but it doesn't matter). 6.) Blizzard will go into a freefall and try to fix things but the damage is done and players cant trust Blizzard.

I hope that Blizzard foresees this happening and informs all members they will temporarily disable the Warden client. Meanwhile they will QUICKLY release a patch that changes the way Warden Client reads information. In the interim they will issue a letter that they will be monitoring the game for cheaters and exploiters will aggressively monitor and ban those that are caught. If Blizzard does this my image of them will go up ten-fold.

Eh, Blizzard got caught snagging names and e-mail address from people's registrys right after StarCraft came out, and nobody really gave a crap after the initial hooblah. (Aside from Germany, who sued them since it was against the law) they took it out and StarCraft went on to become one of Blizzard's more popular games.

Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, has created a controversial program that detects cheaters by scanning the processes that are running at the time the game is played. Called the Warden, the anti-cheating program cannot detect any files that are hidden with Sony BMG's content protection, which only requires that the hacker add the prefix "$sys$" to file names.

Why is there any reason to be happy over that? The Sony malware is several orders of magnitude worse than what WoW does.

The Sony prog-Installs itself with NO warning (WoW mentions what it does in the EULA)-Is damn near impossible to remove by any means short of a reinstall (Uninstall WoW and the spyware goes with it)-Sticks around even in safe mode (WoW's runs only when WoW is run)-Like how it can be used to bypass WoW's detection methods, it can similarly be used by another malicious program to bypass Spyware detectors, Virus scanners and basically opens a giant security whole on you computer.

What WoW is doing isn't that great; by what Sony is doing is downright criminal. Nothing to cheer over.